Saturday, February 11, 2012

All well. The
hat lacks but a round or two before the crown shaping. I should be well able to
finish this evening. Then – swatch Georgia O’Keefe? (That’s the madelinetosh
shade for my husband’s sleeveless v-neck.) Or have I kept adequate gauge notes
from all that Brownstone knitting before Christmas? I have a feeling that the
Effortless pattern – written for madelinetosh – uses a larger needle size than
I employed on the Brownstones. Maybe kill two birds with one stone by swatching
with that.

Miscellaneous

Zite found
an interview with Franklin
for us. He is wildly enthusiastic about the designs of Laura Grutzeck.
She doesn’t quite hack it for me. Franklin’s
is a trim figure, and he’s brilliant at fit – look at his recent lopapeysa (his blog
post for January 20) if you haven’t already. I prefer to snuggle into something more form-concealing. I think his admiration for Grutzeck is sort of like the
way IK was full of patterns that would look good on Eunny, when she first took
over the editorship.

There’s
lots about yarn-bombing on Zite these days. And my brother-in-law sent me this one
this morning, from Dallas.
Alas, I’ve never seen any myself. Edinburgh
is full of statues which might benefit.

Mary Lou, thank you for the
sock-shaping tip (comment yesterday). What happens when you get to the heel?
Specifically, how many stitches for the foot? My memorised Patternworks pattern
decreases gusset stitches until you get down to the number you thought of
first, and then you proceed to knit the foot on exactly the same number as the
leg. All this will become clearer to me when I get to grips with Gibson-Roberts
and start measuring feet.

I am desperately sorry about your horse.

Non-knit

I was
thinking specifically yesterday of dates which are referred to, in normal
speech, by the date only. “9/11”, “Ides of March”, “Quatorze juillet”, as you
say, Mary Lou. I think the French – and the Italians? – go in for it more than
we do, and name streets after dates. One might have to add the Glorious
Twelfth, here in Britain,
to our little list – August 12, when the
grouse-shooting season opens.

There are
lots of other important dates which we all remember – Christmas and Groundhog
Day and, yes, Pearl Harbor. But we don’t
normally refer to them just by number. “Armistice Day” used to puzzle me, as a
child – was it not odd to remember a former armistice when the world was
convulsed by war?

5 comments:

Zite has become one of my favourite apps on my iPad ever since you introduced me to it on your blog. Sometimes you mention stories you read on Zite that never make an appearance on my iPad. I would have thought if one had knitting as one of the categories the same stories would come up no matter where the person lived. I looked for the Franklin story this morning and it is not to be found. Maybe it has to do with the time difference and when we check Zite?

All of this talk about shaping socks has me rethinking my well-established habit of knitting straight down the leg. Knitting without shaping makes for a mindless knit, but I have to admit that my socks do have a tendency to sag by the end of the day. Maybe a bit of shaping would cure that.

thanks for the sympathy, Jean. Re. the sock shaping, I then do the heel on 50% of the reduced number of sts, and when decreasing for the foot, decrease back to the full number. I have a friend with narrow feet, and for her, I work the foot on the reduced number of sts.

Cinco de Mayo! I'm surprised I forgot that in yesterday's famous dates discussion.

Do you (or the fortunate recipients of your knitting) find that crew-length socks really need shaping in the leg? Knee socks are a different story, of course. I haven't yet got them to stay up properly; even with shaping they've been 80's-style slouch socks. -- Gretchen